Sighting A Straight Line

Introduction

I would say sighting a straight line is a common practice used by builders and joiners to determine if a piece of timber is straight or bowed. It can be used to test any length of timber, but long pieces in particular, and requires no tools just eyesight with a good depth of field enabling focusing along the whole length of timber to be checked.

Sighting A Straight Line Along The Edge Of Timber

Just hold the timber with one corner of the end near to an open eye while closing the other and look down the long edge of the timber to see if it looks straight or bowed.

SAFETY NOTICE: Wear Safety Glasses to protect your eyes.

Below are six images that you might see when sighting a straight line along the edge of timber depending on whether the timber is straight, bowed or twisted:

Notice how Straight Timber looks, especially the second image from the left. If you were in the wood yard selecting straight timber for a project, or you were planing timber to make it straight and true, this is what you would be looking for in the finished product.

CAUTIONARY NOTE: Remember a long piece of timber will be bowed down towards the ground at the far end, when sighting along it, due to gravity. Sighting should only be used to see if timber is bowed to the left or the right when holding a long piece up to look along it. To check the top and bottom are straight rotate the timber so that the top and bottom become the left and right faces. Then they won’t be affected by teh pull of gravity.

Sighting A Straight Line On Other Things

This ‘sighting a straight line’ technique can be used with all sorts of other materials besides a strip of wood. You can check the state of doors or furniture like sideboards and tables.

My Latest News

1st February 2019: I have just deleted a file named wordfenceScanner.php.bin from my PHP .opcache folder on my server. Wordfence had detected it contained the TimThumb script which is considered to be unsafe. I must look into methods of cleaning my PHP cache. It looks as if it contains some outdated files.

2nd January 2019: Again I couldn’t get my WP v5.0.1 to update to v5.0.2 so I followed Wordfence’s instructions and upgraded it manually. I made a good job of it and searched for the cause of the problem. It turned out to be caused by the plugin DGXPCO which is designed to improve Core update security.

Hopefully if the Core updating server got hacked and a false Core program was sent this plugin wouldn’t allow it to be applied due to manual intervention. Well that manual intervention failed to allow valid Core updates through so I have deactivated that plugin for the time being.

21st December 2018: I just upgraded my server from PHP 7.2 to PHP 7.3. I had an immediate problem with the plugin Taxonomy List Widget. I have sent a comment to the author Erick T. Hitter asking him to look into it. Otherwise so far so good.

14th December 2018: Having experimented with the new Gutenberg editor for over a year I was finally able to update WordPress to version 5.0.1 with Gutenberg in core yesterday. I couldn’t do it last week due to a technical hitch resolved by 1&1 IONOS. I then deleted the Gutenberg plugin, which had already been de-activated by the update. That caused a block editing problem where I only had Classic Paragraphs instead of Gutenberg Paragraphs. That was resolved by me de-activating TinyMCE, a plug in to enhance the original editor.

I can now report that I have adjusted some posts created or edited using various versions of Gutenberg to be editable using version 5.0.1.

The latest major change took place in December 2015 when WordPress version 4.4 became active and Helpful Colin changed the theme to the ‘Twenty Sixteen’ theme which is designed to look good on all screen sizes. Although this may have improved the blog for mobile users it has removed some functionality available in ‘Twenty Fourteen’.

Follow My Mentor Becci:

Follow My Mentor Chris:

Advertising

Currently Helpful Colin receives no payment for advertising on this site and there are no advertisements placed on it, except those seen via links to other sites, e.g. YouTube. References to businesses are sometimes made when they are the source of materials used by Helpful Colin and to be fare other businesses which may be able to supply the same or similar materials are mentioned where practical to do so.

Comments by Third Parties

Articles in this blog can receive comments by third parties. All comments are vetted by Helpful Colin before publishing. Comment Spam is filtered by the Wordpress plugin Akismet.

RSS Feed

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here:
Privacy Policy including Cookie Policy